(I'm a co-founder of Balanced)
Balanced's mission is to increase the global economy by enabling new commerce. Our current mechanism to do that is with payments [1].
So we don't actually want to build a processing company, per se, but we're finding that's the best way to accomplish our mission right now.
At some point, it's likely that we'll have to make changes to our mechanism, but until then we feel building the world's first open source payments infrastructure company [2] is a great way to accomplish our goal.
[1] https://www.balancedpayments.com/about [2] http://www.fastcolabs.com/3008944/open-company/why-i-made-my...